the name of each foreign or domestic organization, association, movement, group or combination of persons which the Attorney General, after appropriate investigation and determination, designates as totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive, or as having adopted a policy of advocating or approving the commission of acts of force or violence to deny others their rights under the Constitution of the United States, or as seeking to alter the form of government of the United States by unconstitutional means.[3]

”

Attorney General Tom Clark compiled the list, and on March 20, 1948 it was published in the Federal Register.[4] It did not list individuals.

Communist groups, which emerged both in the pre-war and the post-war list, are marked by one "". In the meantime some trade unions communists had excluded other openly communist groups from their membership lists, were dissolved, partially also by government resolution. The Venona project intercepted and translated messages of Soviet spies inside the U.S. reporting to Moscow, but the information was not translated until years later and was not used by the Attorney General to make the list.

Thousands of people with an inclination for radical thinking signed petitions or became members of these groups without being aware of the Communist control of the group.